I am not easily distrac– OH LOOK A CHICKEN

Since Monday of last week (not yesterday Monday, but the Monday before that) my daily schedule has been the following:

Wake up.
Start the coffee.
Start the dye pots that I set up the night before.
Pour coffee.
Let dye pots heat for one hour (while drinking coffee and catching up on the Internets).
Start dyeing Color #1 (approximate time for loading all three pots, 20 minutes).
Wait 20 minutes, check and stir yarn.
Wait 20 minutes. Add citric acid.
Wait an hour. Take out yarn, rinse, switch, start dyeing Color #2 (approximate time for loading all three pots, 20 minutes).
Wait 20 minutes, check and stir yarn.
Wait 20 minutes. Add citric acid.
Wait an hour. Take out yarn, rinse, switch, start dyeing Color #3 (approximate time for loading all three pots, 20 minutes).
Wait 20 minutes, check and stir yarn.
Wait 20 minutes. Add citric acid.
Wait an hour. Take out yarn, rinse, switch, start dyeing Color #4 (approximate time for loading all three pots, 20 minutes).
Wait 20 minutes, check and stir yarn.
Wait 20 minutes. Add citric acid.
Wait an hour. Take out yarn, rinse, hang outside to dry. Set up pots for next day.

I love that this is what I do, but I have to be honest… those 20 minute increments slay me. The hours are mostly OK, I can get stuff done in them. But the 20  minutes?! I have an alarm that I set, because believe me, I will forget that 20 minutes (or an hour) has gone by and that I need to do something (I used to use the stove/oven timer, but then whenever Tim was cooking and using it I would randomly run into the dye room when the timer would go off, panicked that I’d totally forgotten I was doing something… so I downloaded a timer app for my tablet). So the alarm goes off, and I have a moment of trying to remember which stage I was on in the process, go and do the stage, come back and reset my alarm for the appropriate time… and try to remember what I was doing before the timer went off.

If I were smart (HAHAHAHA) I would make a list of a bunch of things that would take me either 15 or 45 minutes, and I would do those things, and only those things, in the 20 minute and 60 minute arcs of time that I have between stages of yarn. If I were smart. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Instead, I spend five to ten minutes trying to remember what I was doing, get back into the groove of it, and then another however many minutes of actually doing it before the alarm goes off again.

I feel like the dogs in Up, like every once and a while I just randomly yell “SQUIRREL!” for no reason. Speaking of dogs, it’s been hard to get my walks in, in the last week. A couple of times I have managed to line that first hour up with an early morning walk, since I walk for about 45 minutes. But not every day. So even though I’m getting a lot of steps in walking from one end of my house to another fourteen times a day, they’re not really exercisey steps. Is “exercisey” a word? IT IS NOW. So in addition to being able to hold a thought in my head for about the same amount of time as a goldfish does, I also feel like a slug.

HOWEVER! I am getting a shit-ton of work done, and it’s work that I’d be spreading out over three months, if not doing it now. Hopefully soon we will hear what our friends want for their property, and if it comes in at what we are hoping for, we’ll be buying it and moving (so everyone cross your fingers for us because if it winds up being out of our price range….?). If we wind up buying the property and moving in October, having all this yarn dyeing behind me, club essentially being finished but for the swag, I will be over the moon happy. That’s a lot of work I won’t have to do at the same time as moving, and that makes this week worth it. Even if Tim asks me things and I just stare at him and blink a lot because it’s super-difficult for me to even form a cohesive sentence right now.

Also, if the property is within our budget, and we can get it, it will open up for me a larger working area and I will be able to up my dye pots from three to five, almost doubling what I can do in a round, and possibly shortening my work day because of it. Three rounds of five instead of four rounds of three… I like those numbers.

I plotted all my work out to get this done, and some fiber dyed for Fiber-In, and I will be continuing to dye straight through until Sunday, six days from now. Five? What is today? Last night I dreamed I forgot to pick up my aunt and uncle at the airport.

CHICKEN!